The sound and the fury

November 16, 2007

BY JIM DeROGATIS POP
MUSIC CRITIC

Several years into the bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you'd be
hard-pressed to find any American, regardless of their specific
political convictions, who doesn't occasionally feel like screaming in
anger and frustration while watching the nightly news.

Plenty of musicians have attempted to put those feelings into song, but
few have been as successful as the Florida punk band Against Me! "Protest
songs in a response to military aggression / Protest songs to try and
stop the soldier's gun / But the battle raged on,"
guitarist-vocalist Tom Gabel sings on "White People for Peace," the most
striking track from the band's fourth album, "New Wave."

Typical for this songwriter, the lyrics are a mouthful. But reading
them doesn't do justice to the way they sound on record, where the
band's furious rhythms and massive walls of guitar combine to make the
sentiments seem absolutely anthemic.

"I always write lyrics first," Gabel says. "I'm a strong believer
that there are only so many guitar chords, and those are inevitably
going to repeat themselves. I think that if you write the lyrics first
and then adapt the melody around those, the cadence of the words will
dictate what the melody is, whereas if you write the chord progression
first, there's a space that you have to fit the words into, and I don't
want to be limited in what I want to say."

Gabel has had plenty to say ever since he started performing in the
late '90s -- just a 17-year-old kid from Gainesville, Fla., with an
acoustic guitar and some occasional help from a friend on drums. By the
time he released his first full album as Against Me!, "Reinventing Axl
Rose" (2002), the guitars had gone electric, the sound had become much
more hard-hitting and the pieces were in place to make the group --
currently completed by bassist Andrew Seward, drummer Warren Oakes and
second guitarist James Bowman -- one of the most popular acts on the
skate-punk/Warped Tour circuit.

For "New Wave," the band signed to Sire Records and worked with
Madison, Wis.-based producer Butch Vig (Garbage, Nirvana) to craft its
biggest and most rousing sounds yet. Like every punk band that's made
the leap from the indie underground to a major label, Against Me! has
garnered charges of "sellout." But Gabel says he's been getting those --
and ignoring them -- for years.

"I think that one of the unfortunate things that happened with punk
was that it was originally supposed to be this type of music that had no
boundaries and borders as to what you were playing. It wasn't, 'This
sounds like punk'; it was all these different bands that sounded nothing
alike making up the punk scene. Then that movement got really split, and
New Wave came from there.

"I didn't realize it at the time that we titled the record 'New
Wave,' but Seymour Stein, who started Sire Records, was actually the one
who coined the term 'New Wave' [as a more marketable alternative to
'punk']. I thought that was kind of fitting, being that we are a band
that came from the punk scene, and here we are making our major-label
debut and people are going to say we aren't punk anymore."

Gabel thinks a lot about whether it's possible to have a genuine
alternative culture in an era where any spark of youthful rebellion
instantly becomes a scam for Hot Topic, iTunes and Starbucks. "Is the
culture now a product that's disposable?" he sings on "Up the Cuts,"
another memorable new track. "All the punks still singing the same
song / Is there anyone thinking what I am? / Is there any other
alternative? / Are you restless like me?"

By his own admission, Gabel is much better at posing these questions
than providing the answers. But he clearly believes in the power of
music to inspire if not actually affect change -- which brings us back
to "White People for Peace," one of the last songs written for the new
album.

"Up to that point, some of the songs had kind of skirted the fact
that there's a war happening right now, but I really wanted a song that
completely addressed it. At the same time, it was named what it was
named because I recognize the fact that I'm a white kid who comes from a
fairly privileged middle-class background, and I'm traveling around in a
posh, comfy tour bus, and I get the privilege to get up onstage and play
my guitar every night. I can turn the war on and off in my life whenever
I feel like it, and there's something extremely cliched and trite about
that."

Yet what is the artist's alternative: to simply ignore the world
around him?

"Exactly: Either you talk about it and you're a little cliched, or
you don't talk about it and you ignore what's really happening and what
you think about it.

"I feel like I'm going to sound extremely cheesy saying this, and
that's unavoidable, but music is almost like a spiritual thing for me,"
Gabel concludes. "You can't put into words what it's like when you hear
a song that just hits you, and you're like 'That's it!' When you hear a
song and you fall in love with it, for years and years, when you hear it
again, it will take you right back to that time and place in your life.
I still have some mixtape songs that will take me back to when I was 16
or 17 years old and what I was doing at that time. Video games don't do
that, and nothing else really does."